AT LUNCH WITH: Katie and Anne Roiphe; One Daughter's Rebellion Or Her Mother's Imprint?

Published: November 10, 1993

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At lunch, Mrs. Roiphe kvells discreetly over Katie, the fourth of five daughters in a blended "yours, mine and ours" brood she and her second husband, Herman Roiphe, a psychoanalyst, steered into adulthood. Katie grew up in a classic New York liberal-intellectual milieu, went to Brearley, a private girls' school, then to Harvard and Princeton, where she is a doctoral candidate in English. She is living in the West Village and writing a dissertation on writers of the 1940's and 50's and their relation to Freud. "The distant past," Ms. Roiphe said, glancing at her mother.

"The very far, distant past," Mrs. Roiphe, who is 57, said with a laugh.

Ms. Roiphe is immersed now in a chapter on Mary McCarthy, the novelist and cultural critic whose career Ms. Roiphe regards as something of a template for her own.

Many of the worst sins Ms. Roiphe's detractors tax her with -- the fact that she is assertive, articulate and well educated -- are clearly the values most carefully nurtured while she was growing up.

"The question of an education disqualifying you as a social critic rather than qualifying you seems so puzzling to me," Mrs. Roiphe said. During a mother-daughter reading at Shakespeare & Company Booksellers last month, a tense-voiced member of the audience wondered if her daughter's privileged background made it hard to identify with meeker, more self-esteem-challenged women. As the atmosphere heated up, Mother Roiphe rose to point out that both Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, two high-society dames known to wield their pens as scalpels, came from privileged backgrounds, prompting a member of the audience to bellow, "She can take care of herself."

She can, and that, too, is probably a legacy of a family of definite personalities and opinions. While Katie and the other children were growing up, Mrs. Roiphe explained as she disentwined her chicken salad from its leafy adornment, her children knew where she stood. "I was writing all the time," she said. She remembers during the 60's breaking away from work to join friends at antiwar demonstrations. "We took large numbers of children in strollers," she recalled.

Feminism had not quite coalesced into the movement it would become when, in the late 60's, Katie was born and Mrs. Roiphe was writing her second novel, "Up the Sandbox," about the fantasy life of a housewife. "When 'Up the Sandbox' came out and it was recognized as a feminist novel, I was rather surprised," Mrs. Roiphe said. "It didn't come out of a political frame, it came out of an observational, deeply felt frame -- which happened to be political."

During the 70's she kept writing, publishing three novels as well as turning out newspaper and magazine articles on the concerns of that self-actualizing decade. None of her work showed much of a care for whether it stayed on the correct side of some ideological line in the sand. "I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic," Mrs. Roiphe said. "I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents."

She criticized feminists for trivializing the family and the lives of women raising children; praised traditional education over the looser free-school experiments popular in the late 60's; examined adolescent sexuality, and profiled a controversy about lesbianism at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College.

Many of her issues obviously emerged from her "lively family of dogs and cats running around and lots of sisters," as Ms. Roiphe remembers the Roiphe household of that period. Neither mother nor daughter could recall giving or getting advice about boys. Mrs. Roiphe declined to pass on the advice her own mother gave her.

"I couldn't tell Katie what had been told to me because I knew that was all wrong," Mrs. Roiphe said. "My desire was for her to have an adolescence free of fear, free of the idea that she wasn't entitled to have some sexual feelings of her own and free most particularly of the barriers that were between male and female when I was growing up."

Addressing her daughter directly, she said: "I wanted you to have men friends, to know men and not to feel this was somebody from Mars who was out to ruin your reputation, which is the way I was brought up."

Mrs. Roiphe sat back from the table and went on: "I'm not sure I ever said that. If you have to say it, you're already in trouble. It should have been part of the fabric of how we were living."

Her journalism inspired barrages of enraged letters and personal invective from the various constituencies, some of the language still vivid after many years. She continues to range widely, writing fiction, essays, a book on child development with her husband and, most recently, biweekly columns for The New York Observer.

In her book, Katie Roiphe claims to simply bear witness to the events she has observed.

"A vital political movement should be able to sustain critiques," Ms. Roiphe said. "You should be able to say: 'I am a feminist. I do think that we need to modify the way we're talking about rape, the images we're projecting.' Feminism should be large enough to encompass the kind of maverick positions."

A maverick position, not a rebellion, her mother emphasized. "May I say, I am a mother trying very hard to catch up with my daughter. She is not in rebellion against me. I am extremely proud of her independence of thought. I wish such a rebellion on all mothers everywhere."

Photos: Anne Roiphe and her daughter Katie, two firmly feminist generations, at the Gotham Bar and Grill. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) (pg. C1); Anne Roiphe, above left, and daughter Katie, above right, give readings from Anne's "Loving Kindness" and Katie's "The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus." (Photographs by Adam Fernandez for The New York Times) (pg. C12)